The most familiar wound in medieval romance is not literal but metaphorical: the wound of love. The conceit imagines the heroine (consciously or not) penetrating the knight’s heart – either through her image or gaze – and inflicting a wound that only she can heal. Romance writers such as Chrétien and Guillaume de Lorris adopted the metaphor from the troubadours. By the time Chaucer’s Troilus passes Criseyde in the temple and is ‘Right with hire loke thorough-shoten’, the entire audience would be familiar enough with the motif to wonder whether the lady would serve as the knight’s physician or agent of death. In contrast to Chaucer, Malory shows little interest in the lover’s malady. Rather, it is physical injury – cuts, slashes, stabs and punctures – that Malory reports, usually under the single noun ‘wound’.

Malory treats these injuries realistically. Wounds are staunched to stop the flow of blood, searched, cleansed – on one occasion with ‘whyghte wyne’ to prevent infection (234.18–19) – and ‘salved’. ‘Rest’ or ‘repose’ is required so that the injured man may be made ‘hole’ or ‘healed’, his injury ‘well eased’ or ‘well amended’. Yet wounds in the Morte Darthur can bear more than literal meaning. Chivalry demands martial display and, as Andrew Lynch claims in his seminal study, blood is ‘the basic currency of fights and quests’; its display literalizes noble status. Thus blood that flows from male-on-male violence and the resulting wounds prove a knight’s worth, sometimes even when he loses the battle, as for La Cote Male Tayle (473.15–32). Injuries can represent a knight’s honour and function, in Laurie Finke and Martin Shichtman’s witty phrase, as ‘symbolic capital’. Arguing against a tendency of gender critics to assess all wounds as feminizing, Kenneth Hodges analyses the positive role wounds play in educating knights and creating community, stating that ‘the injuries sustained give weight and worth to the abstract issues being fought about’. Through wounds and their trace in scars, Malory writes upon a knight’s body the honour he has gained in battle.

Intriguing to me, however, are the wounds that mark not honour but dishonour, and the ways they are interpreted by the injured knight within the tale and the audience outside it.